Offstage Villainy

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It's natural for works to follow the Point of View of The Hero, considering that the story revolves around them. Of course, that means that anything that the hero doesn't see isn't portrayed directly. This includes the villain's actions that don't occur in front of the hero.

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This is not necessarily a bad thing. If handled well, it makes the Big Bad more credible, showing off the depth of the villain's effort and planning by showing that their reach extends beyond the lives of the heroes. A good villain is that much more appreciable as a threat, and the audience picks up on it. Relying only on Offstage Villainy, however, while not showing the villain do all that much evil onscreen, will turn their "bad guy" status into an Informed Attribute. It also disqualifies them from Complete Monster status, as a Complete Monster's actions must be visible, either directly or through their effects.

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Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Assassination Classroom: Aside from his shameless perversion, Koro-sensei has not done anything that is morally wrong on-screen. And yet, he has all but destroyed the Moon in the backstory and will do the same to the Earth in the close future. No info is provided on whether he massacred the combined armies of the world trying to kill him or just did a No-Sell of their barrage. This is later subverted with the reveal that he didn't destroy the moon nor does he want to destroy the Earth; a massive explosion is simply what happens when the bodies of antimatter-infused creatures like Koro-sensei undergo critical failure. The plot started as a variation of Suicide by Cop combined with upholding the last wish of his love.

On the other hand, we find out that Koro-sensei used to be an assassin, no less than the previous "God of Death", and thus he's responsible both for countless victims killed for a price and for training the current "God of Death", who eventually turns against him. It's only after being transformed and losing his loved one that he takes a turn for the better.

Mahou Sensei Negima! has this in spades in-story, concerning Evangeline. She has a 600 year long history of evil and bloodshed resulting a 6 million dollar bounty and essentially acting as the boogeyman of the magic world (eat your peas, or Evangeline will come and eat you). Despite all of this, she only does a few villainous things on-screen: sucking blood from students and attacking Negi. Other than that, she regularly helps out the heroes, going so far as to train them and let them use her magical resort for vacation. It's even hinted that her evil reputation is an exaggeration, and that she acted the part so that people would leave her alone. She still constantly tries to claim she's evil, but everyone who actually knows her claims that she's not that bad.

The way she tells her backstory suggests that her reputation as a deadly murderer is because people kept hunting her and getting killed in self-defense. Being a vampire in medieval Europe wasn't exactly the best situation for living a peaceful life. Eva, for her part, thinks that these excuses are flimsy and anyone who thinks she's not evil due to this is an idiot.

In One Piece, Trafalgar Law, aka The Surgeon of Death, gets hit with this trope. Thus far we have seen him act very calm, insightful, reserved, and healing Luffy. None of that screams villainy. It might be played with; between how he acts and the reason for the bounties on Luffy and Zoro, he might be similarly wanted for actions that are, at the very least, justifiable. In which case, the offscreen behavior that is villainous is only towards the corrupt World Government (or a misunderstanding). And now that he's a Warlord of the Sea, his darker side is being hinted at once again. How did he become one? By removing the hearts of 100 pirates and sending them to the World Government.

Gold Roger also applies, in a sense. Every flashback featuring him always seems to present him positively. By contrast, pretty much every villainous act he's done is always presented via word of mouth of his victims.

In general, if a pirate is not meant to be a villain (like the Supernovas, or the similarly notorious Super Rookies introduced in the Dressrosa arc), his more unpleasant traits will be kept offscreen.

Any of the villains in Pokémon are a lot more effective when not sharing screen-time with the heroes. Notably, Team Rocket were originally billed as ruthless and effective gangsters, and the larger organization still seems to be that offscreen, but almost all of their schemes that are actually shown tend to end in failure before anyone is hurt.

Comic Strips

What little mischiefDennis The Menace still gets up to anymore is almost entirely reduced to this. Most of the time we don't even get to learn what he did to land himself in the time-out chair.

Another Realm: Xerol Shaaryak built his enterprise on Illium through nefarious means, evident by his employing of asari commandos, and the no small measure of respect he gets from the underground. These acts are heavily implied to have been violent, particularly in batarian circles.

The Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Twilight crossover Blue Moon features Bella Swan (after learning that she is one of the newly-activated Slayers) realising that she was actually indirectly taunted by the First during its campaign against the Potentials, guessing that the First was the reason she heard Edwards voice speaking to her when the Cullens were away. Jasper and Edward confirm this was the case when Jasper reveals that he kept seeing some of his old vampire associates in the run-up to Bellas birthday, Edward saw Bella while he was away (Bella having 'died' for a few seconds after James's attack), and the other Cullens report seeing various other deceased acquaintances around the same time.

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Films — Animation

The Great Mouse Detective uses this very effectively. Basil mentions that Ratigan has been committing crimes for years, and Ratigan later names a few of them his Villain Song. Also in his Villain Song, his Mooks sing, "Even meaner? You mean it? Worse than the widows and orphans you drowned?"

"In one fell swoop the movie has its would-be hero mocking and yelling at an essentially innocent villain. If a large number of truly despicable actions by Graves had been shown, perhaps we could accept our hero calling him names, or mocking his education. As it is, how many actual representations of villainy by Graves do we see or hear about: one. Raines and Marcus are discussing the position of harbor master, when Rains says "Schuyler Graves has expanded its scope. It's got a lot of people angry around here". And that, oh my Brothers, is it. Based upon that, we are to take him as a villain."

Repo! The Genetic Opera has Luigi and Pavi, brothers stated to be a murderer and a rapist, respectively. While we see Luigi stab several people to death, all the girls we see with Pavi are quite willing. This could be because while violence is always fun, it's really hard to joke about rape.

Frank Miller for most of High Noon. The hero Kane threw him in prison for unspecified charges before the start of the film, but Miller gets pardoned and decides to take revenge on Kane. Kane runs around town insisting that Miller is a menace to them all, but people refuse to stand with him. Some even sympathize with Miller and insist that Kane is trying to drag them into a personal feud. When Miller finally arrives, he sports some evil scars to prove his villainy, but he still doesn't do anything except go after Kane.

An interesting example is Richard B. Riddick, the Noble Demon protagonist of The Chronicles of Riddick who, despite being the protagonist, is considered by all to be evil incarnate. While in Pitch Black he certainly starts off as a sinister character, in all of his screen time across the number of games and movies he appears in, he never really does anything explicitly evil. Most of it can easily be recognised as a man with a strong survival instinct who just wants people to leave him the fuck alone.

The Lord Marshal's extermination of the Furyans to try to cheat the prophecy that Aereon gave him, which is only alluded to in the theatrical cut. Averted in the extended cut, which actually shows him committing these massacres.

Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs, at least for the first half or so. We hear that he's a psycho, sure, we hear that he shot a bunch of civilians, but whenever we actually see him, he's calm and cool and affable. The only evidence we have for his villainy is the word of Mr.'s Pink and White. Then the ear scenehappens.

In Serenity, The Operative doesn't know where Serenity went to hide, so he has every place they've hidden in the past bombed to bits. The crew only finds this out when they try to contact all of them.

In Con Air, Garland Greene is presented as one of the most horrific and prolific serial killers who ever lived, and is certainly feared by the other criminals, but all his crimes occurred before his introduction. He boasts of killing a little girl and wearing her face as a Genuine Human Hide, yet he thankfully refrains from killing a girl he runs into. The end rather implies that he's gone good, but with his past crimes this still makes him an extremeKarma Houdini.

In Dracula Untold, the Elder Vampire makes Vlad admit that he butchered not hundreds, but thousands of innocents, but since it would be hard to root for him, we see him actually doing none of it.

Lord of War: When Andre Jr. is introduced, Yuri notes internally that this son of an African dictator is a psychopathic murderer, rapist, and cannibal. Though he does end up shooting at civilians, none of Jr.'s most heinous crimes are shown.

The Phantom Menace: After the Trade Federation invades Naboo, we keep being told that the people are suffering under the occupation and that the death toll is rising. The thing is, we never actually see any of the Nabooan citizens suffer, which makes the whole thing look more like Gunboat Diplomacy (albeit by a megacorp wilfully manipulated by a Sith lord) than a whole planet being "subjected to slavery and death".

It's never actually clarified whether it really happened. Qui-Gon suspects it's a lie to trick them into giving away their position when they hear it, and it doesn't profit them in any way. The Federation are explicitly unhappy about landing troops at all.

The film, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile, doesn't show any of the murders Ted Bundy committed, and instead focuses on his arrests, his known escapes, and finally the main trial that convicted him as a serial killer. The only violence in the film, is a flashback showing Bundy knocking out one of his victims with a crowbar, and a photo of the victim in the woods without her head, which he admits he cut off with a hacksaw to his heartbroken Ex.

Literature

In A Brother's Price, this is necessary as the heroes have no idea who the villain is, or, more precisely, who is paying the petty criminals they're fighting. Therefore, the most horrible crime (the rape and murder of a man) occurs offscreen, and the heroes only find the body.

In Dragon Bones, most things the villains do are only hinted at. Justified, as no one really likes to read detailed descriptions of torture or rape, and the descriptions of the wounds are enough to show how evil the villains are. The murders are on-stage, most other things aren't, or if they are, we get to see them from the point of view of the (at that point) delirious victims.

In Sherlock Holmes, in Professor Moriarty's first appearance, we never actually read about anything he did; he just "has his hands" in villainy. This was remedied in the later The Valley of Fear. Granted, his villainy is still technically offscreen, but it's one hell of a punch in the gut all the same.

Whilst Gregor "The Mountain that Rides" Clegane is one of the cruelest villains in the series, the reader only hears about the great majority of his deeds from other characters, rather than witnessing them directly (though there are often enough details included and enough reason to believe the various narrators to be reliable that it still gets the effect across, showing that this trope is not inherently flawed).

The same with Lord Roose Bolton and Ramsay Bolton, who like to flay the skin off their captives' fingers until the captives beg for the fingers to be chopped off due to the pain. Poor Theon Greyjoy, while not the nicest person, gets this treatment. For obvious reasons, this isn't directly shown to the reader. It's hinted that Roose has done a number of things that we never even hear about, as he complains that Ramsay has allowed his evil deeds to be well-known to the point that everyone is talking about them - thus harming House Bolton's reputation - whereas "no one ever talked about me."

Very much in effect in the novel From Outer Space. The villain only actually appears in the last ten or so pages and, although he is indeed both a colossal jerkass and a Dirty Coward, he doesn't come off as being anywhere near as evil as the Hunter claims him to be.

A common trait of villains in Septimus Heap is that most of their evil deeds are never shown, just discussed or narrated.

Sisterhood Series by Fern Michaels: The author mishandles this trope a number of times. This results in stories where the villains are just not as terrible as they're claimed to be, causing their punishments to come off as Disproportionate Retribution, and causing the protagonists inflicting said punishments to look like the actual villains of the series instead!

Wilmer of The Maltese Falcon is an absolute terror whenever he's not observed directly; he is confirmed to have killed three people over the course of the novel - at least one of whom was also a tough multiple murderer himself - and is implied to have done similar things in the past in his career as a hired gun. Whenever he appears in the main action, though, he comes off as more hapless than anything, gets repeatedly beaten up and/or shaken down, and the protagonist refuses to take him seriously.

Most of the terrible things Dorian Gray does are never gone into- probably because it was better to let the reader's imagination fill in the gaps than to try to fill them with what sins could be actually printed in 1890. There's much talk about the spectacular things Dorian collects over the best part of twenty years, then Basil turns up and comes out with a list of people whose lives have been ruined by Dorian's behaviour (and there are clearly a lot that Basil doesn't know about.)

In Kill Decision, Odin is reluctant to get the help of Mordecai because he's supposedly horrid scum even by Odin's loose standards. But apart from a not-entirely-unjustified attempt at calling the authorities on them and a throwaway mention of his porn being of the cephalopodic variety, we don't actually see him being the kind of absolute monster that deserves Odin's scorn.

The titular villain of Stephen King's It may antagonize the characters a lot but manages still to fit this trope quite well. It has been around since the beginning of time and as Mike Hanlon finds out, Pennywise has been present for every disaster and mass-killing in Derry's history. Not to mention It murders numerous characters off-screen during the story proper.

Villains by Necessity: Not one of the villain protagonists does anything really evil in the story, thus allowing us to sympathize with them. Anything like that is only mentioned as part of their past (for instance, Sam's apparently assassinated dozens of people). The worst is likely Valerie killing some dolphins with magic for sport, but much worse is mentioned as having also been committed by her people. Blackmail also destroys the Gnifty Gnomes, just for being somewhat annoying.

Harry hates mobster Johnny Marcone with a vengeance in The Dresden Files and often refuses to call him anything more dignified than scum, citing his time as a mobster and the ways he hurt Chicago. But going strictly by what we see, Marcone's arguably more morally upright than Harry himself; a lot of what he does onscreen, particularly in later books, is genuinely helpful to the city, even if Marcone has his own interests front and center. Meanwhile, all of his more heinous deeds are only alluded to at best and he never actually opposes Harry.

Project Tau: The torture sessions are an established part of Tau - and later Kata's - daily routine, but are never described in the book.

Live-Action TV

Game of Thrones: Most of Ser Gregor's worst acts, and those of the soldiers he commands, have occurred offscreen. Though given the sheer level of brutality described, this is certainly a blessing. In his most infamous act, before the events of the series, he murdered and raped the Princess Elia Targaryen but not before killing her infant son Aegon in front of her.

This was a problem faced by the writers of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with the villain Gul Dukat in the first few seasons. He was, in essence, a space nazi who directly oversaw the slave labour camps of the Bajoran people for years, and was by all accounts not a good employer. By the time the series begins however the Bajorans are free, and Gul Dukat comes across as a witty, intelligent (but admittedly egotistical), three dimensional Anti-Villain, despite the characters (more or less correctly) insisting that he's Satan's bastard offspring.

A completely offstage example is Maris from Frasier, Niles Crane's abrasive, manipulative, controlling, hysterical, nigh-sociopathic Jerkass wife. None of the outlandishly horrible things she does are ever actually seen onscreen, as she was The Ghost, but they had a major impact on the series all the same. The writers averted vilifying Maris via Unreliable Narrator by making Niles genuinely in love with her and often oblivious to her faults, as well as making sure that when the characters described her actions, they described them factually and in detail rather than complaining about what a lousy person she was. In fact, the act of describing her actions out loud to the other characters was often what made Niles realize just how nasty some of the things she did really were. As the series went on, Maris became less of an offstage villain and more of an offstage abomination; not only was she increasingly portrayed as a narcissistic sociopath, some of the physical descriptions of her make you wonder if she was even human. The characters don't always seem to be joking when they talk about her this way.

On Heroes, Noah "HRG" Bennet spent 17 years personally participating in the kidnapping, experimentation and mind-wiping of people with special abilities. He also lied to his family the entire time (for their own protection, but still putting them in danger without their knowledge or consent). However, this mostly took place before the pilot episode. This, plus the fact that Bennet was frequently shown onscreen being a Papa Wolf to Claire, caused many fans to be unsympathetic when his family (especially Claire) reacted with revulsion and horror to the revelations about his not-so-distant past.

Wonder Woman (2011 pilot): In the failed pilot, the titular heroine is introduced brutally arresting a drug dealer, and later tortures him for information. Trouble is, we're only given her word that he's a drug dealer, and this Wonder Woman seems like exactly the kind of person who would go off half-cocked on the flimsiest evidence.

The Outer Limits (1995): In "Abaddon", it's used for ambiguity factor when a genocidal warlord is unfrozen from a hypersleep pod. He claims to be innocent of the crimes he's accused of all while acting Obviously Evil. Since his purported human sacrifices and mass murder is all in his backstory, the crew of the ship that found him wonder if the Mega-Corp they work for (and seized the land that belonged to the warlord's followers) actually did frame him, which is left unanswered.

Battlestar Galactica (2003). Tom Zarek is accused of terrorism, abuse of office, political manipulation, and conspiracy to commit murder. By the time the series is over we've seen President Roslin commit every one of those crimes. When he finally does make his move, the writers had to give him a few Kick the Dog moments just to restore the balance (and even these are entirely Pragmatic Villainy).

Blackadder: Captain Edmund Blackadder from the fourth series is generally quite sympathetic, but he also makes mention of his career before World War One. Most notably, he mentions that in those days they only fought enemies that didn't carry guns, and preferred fighting those who didn't have spears either. He also makes reference to "massacring the pygmies of Upper Volta and stealing all their fruit", saving Field Marshal Haig by personally shooting a native armed with a sharpened slice of dried mango, and generally being a willing participant in the ugliest parts of late British colonialism.

Theatre

Don Giovanni is confirmed to be a serial womanizer, but none of his attempted seductions during the course of the story actually succeed in closing the deal. Not for lack of trying, though.

Video Games

Jables's Adventure pushes this to the point of parody. The final boss of the game is King Squid, who readily identifies himself as a villain and boasts that Jables is too late to stop his evil scheme. However, until the pre-boss-fight cutscene, there is literally no mention or foreshadowing of King Squid or his evil plan—until the boss fight, Jables doesn't even know the game has a villain.

The Authority in iD's Rage where throughout the game we're told just how evil they are, how they're out to get you and will kill you on sight...but we see precious little of them before the second disk. The first time we do see them is when we're attempting to break out a terrorist from a prison so their hostility to the player-controlled character is understandable.

Zero Punctuation: Yeah, any governing body that calls itself "The Authority" probably aren't distributing free t-shirts to war widows, but I wish the game would establish that rather than just ask me to assume it.

Whatever it was that Big Bad Hector from Grim Fandango did in life, it was apparently so atrocious that he runs a massive scam to steal No. 9 tickets (only given to the most saintly of people,) sell fake copies of them to less morally-sound people, and hoard the real ones for himself in an attempt to balance it out for when he moves on to the Ninth Underworld.

The police, military and Mega-Corp from the Rockstar game State of Emergency are said to be oppressing the populace, but never shown doing anything particularly heinous to ordinary folks. The only aggression we see from them is their efforts to stop you from murdering panicked citizens or blowing up restaurants and storefronts which, thanks to the very slapdash backstory, are suggested to be, like, really evil restaurants and storefronts, or something.

Likewise, it's never revealed in Planescape: Torment what the first incarnation of The Nameless One did that's so horrible that not even an entire lifetime's worth of atonement could make up for it, hence his search for immortality.

Dr. Merlot, Big Bad of RWBY: Grimm Eclipse, who creates mutated Grimm and sends them after the main characters, but is never seen in person.

In The Elder Scrolls series, barring a few justified exceptions, Giants tend to be Noble SavageGentle Giants who prefer to be left alone and will only attack if provoked in-game. However, Giants are known to raid farms, steal livestock, and attack settlements. This only occurs offscreen and in the backstory.

Dragon Quest VI's second half is mostly the heroes going through minions of Mortamor before he finally appears.

Dragon Quest VII's first disc with Orgodemir. The heroes go back in time to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, always arriving at just the right time to see what the villain of the week's actions have wrought, and then fix them. The main antagonist, Orgodemir, is not actually seen until the end of Disc one. Disc two on the other hand, is another story.

Dragon Quest VIII, for the first half, is all about chasing Dhoulmagus, but the heroes always arrive too late and gather what happened from the townsfolk.

In Fire Emblem: Three Houses Dimitri's status as a villain depends on one's personal perspective, and the route, but the trope applies to him on his route, Azure Moon. While he is disturbingly obsessed with taking revenge on Edelgard, enjoys killing enemy soldiers and once threatens to torture a defeated enemy to death, his significant body count during the Time Skip, which includes civilians and even children, is often mentioned, but never shown. Said route involves his redemption, so perhaps the writers didn't want to make him too unsympathetic.

Web Comics

Other than the fact that he created a game company despite already owning a game reviewing magazine, participating in a Scooby-Doo ripoff, and being unable to see Skull (which apparently only happens to the "extremely self-centered"), we are forever kept in the dark why the PvP crew, especially Cole, hates Max Powers. Especially considering practically EVERYONE in the magazine has done far worse things. Laid out quite nicely on Websnark. Finally explained in a storyline where Cole reveals he hates Max out of pure jealousy of the fact that Max is a much better person than him. And later on, Max can see Skull, though it's not clear why he couldn't before.

Few of the Neopets villains are actually seen doing anything bad. Deliberately invoked for Jhudora, who is free to do as she pleases because she's never been caught at anything.

For the first two years of The Questport Chronicles, the villains never appear until the final showdown, and the heroes learn of their misdeeds second-hand.

Subverted in Eliezer Yudkowsky's The Sword of Good, in which the in-universe Designated Villain, the Lord of Darkness, turns out to be trying to gain Unlimited Power so that he can fix the broken world and save the countless innocents who are suffering and dieing under the existing "balance" between "good and evil". Said Lord of Darkness actually asks The Hero to touch him with the titular Sword of Good, which kills anyone with bad intentions, in the final moments before he ascends.

In Noob, Gaea eventually gets her reputation points so low that she gets kicked out of her faction due to the cumulative consequences of her Manipulative Bastard actions on both player and non-player characters. While she has been seen scamming or blackmailing two of her own guildmates and The Ace, the tricks she pulled on anyone else are shown only in two or three comic-only scenes.

In The Nostalgia Critic, while Hyper stalking him, breaking into his house and kidnapping him is bad enough, she had him for two weeks that we don't see and only get references to. This is more out of necessity than anything else, as (for example) they can't exactly show her lopping off one of his toes like he said she did.

While Dr. Gero was always villainous, Dragon Ball Abridged adds a level of offstage work. While digging through Dr. Gero's research notes about Androids 17 and 18, Bulma finds out that Gero only gave model numbers to successful creations. He had kidnapped and experimented on dozens of orphans over the years until he got results.

Western Animation

Magneto, in the 1990s X-Men animated series, is consistently presented as the heroes' Arch-Enemy, especially in the intro. However, it's only in his first few appearances (and the last episode) that he is actually doing evil and acting at odds with the X-Men. In every other appearance, he is just trying to find a peaceful place for mutants to live, and ends up working with the X-Men against a greater evil. Of course, his major villainous acts in those appearances included large scale industrial and (attempted) nuclear terrorism, so they more than sufficed to establish him as a villain.

Tuma, his Skrall legion, and the Bone Hunters in BIONICLE: The Legend Reborn. Everyone makes them out to be deadly threats, but when they are on-screen, they are revealed to be a bunch of goofy Mooks and a dumb Dragon, and are easily defeated. The only bad thing they do is plundering a village and beating up a good guy, however we never see them do it, and only two villagers react with shock to the destruction of their home (even the Village Leader doesn't seem to care). Keep in mind this only applies to Legend Reborn. In other media, the Bone Hunters raided trade caravans and attacked the city of Vulcanus; while Tuma was a full Evil Overlord, manipulating the Bone Hunters and protagonist tribes and having the Skrall subvert the impending Tournament Arc by razing the stadium instead.

The Venture Bros.: In the Cold Opening of "I Know Why The Caged Bird Kills", The Monarch performs his best villainous entrance ever, slaughtering dozens and leaving pure mayhem in his wake... only to immediately find out that they're at the wrong address and he's raiding his accountant's office instead of the Venture compound.

Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles has the Bugs successfully destroying the White House, the Eiffel Tower and several other targets in an All Your Base Are Belong to Us moment. We don't actually see this, however, as that would probably have been a bit traumatic for a kids' show. Rather shockingly averted with the first appearance of a Brain Bug, though. The psychic "replay" we get shows quite clearly what it does to prisoners. The only thing we don't see is the man's skull actually being pierced; we see the proboscis rise and fall and watch the soldier's body twitching with his head just offscreen.

The Dark Hand are said to have connections to nearly every known form of criminal activity, and when Valmont, Finn and Ratso allow themselves to be arrested, they get a fifty year sentence in a maximum security prison. However, most criminal acts that don't relate to magic artifacts or are otherwise relevant to the plot aren't shown, the Enforcers are mostly portrayed as Affably Evil and incompetent, and while Valmont does start off as a credible threat, he soon undergoes a major Villain Decay.

Ma Vreedle in Ben 10 is constantly shilled as a fearsome, skilled villain whose actions made her wanted in 12 systems, banned in 27 others, and somehow caused Vilgax (who is considered the most dangerous being in the Galaxy) to be terrified by her. The things she is actually seen doing onscreen, however, are cartoonish schemes in the same vein than the show's more comedic villains, making you wonder why everyone is so afraid of her.

In My Little Pony: Friendship Is MagicDiscord's original rule is only mentioned in passing as "an eternal state of unrest and unhappiness," his stained glass window shows him dangling ponies over flames and he himself refers to an afternoon of reducing the world to complete chaos as only "his first changes." One must wonder exactly how horrific his original rule must have been, compared to the evil, but still mostly humorous and silly actions he's shown inflicting onscreen. Given that Discord's very nature is so chaotic, it is possible that the scope of his evilness would vary dramatically depending on how he feels on any given day.

In SpacePOP, villainous things Geela does are usually offscreen, with most of her time being spent on self-promoting TV shows or reveling in her own evilness.

In the 2018 reboot of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Hordak is the founder and leader of the Horde, but the first three seasons show him ruling from the shadows in the Fright Zone. His initial conquests upon arriving on Etheria, during which he would have taken an active role, are not shown on screen.

In season 4, Hordak takes to the battlefield and leads his troops personally. Viewers see a few shots of Hordak firing on the Salineas Sea Gate and the Sea Elf Village with his arm cannon, but most of his siege takes place offscreen. Hordak also remarks that Entrapta is the only princess who has not yet faced him in combat, which implies that he has done battle with several princesses offscreen.

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